Thursday, March 25, 2010

In fact, in response to my facebook launch party invitation, a few kind souls pointed out the mistakes in the Chinese character for "Zen" that I used as the cover image of my e-book and featured in last week's blog post.

Zen

Not-so-perfect Zen

I knew that image wasn't perfect. And I could have used stock imagery, or paid an expert to do it for me.

But I wanted this endeavor to be personal, messier, and to feel more expressive and artistic... So I did them myself. I had a friend write the characters out properly for me in my journal, and then I spent a few wonderful afternoons trying to capture the spirit of each symbol with ink, brush, and the thinnest of rice paper.

Now I knew my kanji characters were possibly cringe-producing-kindergarten-level efforts for a native speaker of Chinese, but I chose to accept that.

Could I have studied Chinese calligraphy for years to perfect my brush strokes and the alignment and form of each character? I suppose, but to what purpose? I might have looked more accomplished and the art would have been more polished, but it would have delayed my e-book and this blog launch by years.

And I felt (and feel) that I have so much to share about blogging that people could forgive the imperfections and go with the overall spirit and beauty of the big idea: Blogging can be Zen.

In the math equation in my mind, it was better to be imperfect.

Now I'm not saying to post stuff you haven't given thought to, or to tweet when angry, (as Social Media Guru Jenn Bailey famously says, "Trying to get something off the internet is like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool.") but the way I see it, we can get frozen into doing nothing because we're afraid of it not being perfect. And it's better to do something good than hold out forever to do one thing without flaws.

Many authors say that when they read their published books, they find things they would still change. At some point they had to let go and put their story out into the world.

Same with blogging.

Get some stuff out into the world.

It doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to be perfect.

I know. Because I'm not.

And you know what? It's okay.

Namaste,Lee

ps - my thanks to Julie Sullivan in particular for keeping it real, and whose critique inspired this post!